


the heavy weight of living

by brella



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:33:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1524617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dick and Wally survive the zombie apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the heavy weight of living

**Author's Note:**

> For bunnywest for the YJ Holiday Exchange – your pinch-hitter dropped off the face of the planet, so I wrote your gift myself, which probably explains why it's so late and so bad! But I really do hope you enjoy it. I tried to squeeze in everything you said you wanted. :)

**i.**

“So… d’you think we’re gonna die?”

Saying that the question comes out of nowhere would be a lie, but that doesn’t shake the jab of shock it sends down Dick’s spine. He tightens his grip on the dusty juice box in his hand and turns his head slowly to look at Wally, not knowing what to say.

“I’m—what?” he settles on answering.

Wally shrugs like it’s not important (but Dick knows that it is; he knows that jerkier movement in his shoulders), his eyes downcast. The light from the orange, smoke-polluted moon makes the red hair on his head look even more ablaze. He needs to cut it; it’s growing out, shading his eyes, matted with soot.

“Sorry to be a buzzkill,” he mumbles, picking at his chewed-down fingernails, “But I mean… we might as well face it now, right? That we’re not going to last.”

“You don’t know that,” Dick tells him in the firmest, most mature voice he can muster, but Wally shakes his head.

“Yeah, I do, Dick,” he retorts with a sharp edge to the words. “I saw what—” He breaks off, closing his eyes. “Mom and Dad…”

Dick wrestles back the memory – the sight of Mary and Rudolph West being dragged back into the wreckage of their house by decaying hands, the sound of Wally’s raw wailing, more an expression of desperate sound than any kind of words.

“We’re going to be okay,” Dick assures him, even though he’s sick of saying the words, even though he’s sick of the runaway sentimentality in them, the kind that never thrives in this kind of ruin, in this kind of overshadowing stench of death.

“What are we gonna do, run away?” Wally shouts suddenly, throwing an arm out and jerking his torso to face Dick with a scowl on his face that’s half-frustrated and half-terrified. “Where are we gonna go? This is _everywhere_ , dude; what chance do we stand against a legion of the undead the size of the entire U.S. population?”

“I don’t know, okay?!” Dick barks back. It’s the first time he’s admitted he doesn’t know, and it leaves a sour metal taste on his teeth. “I don’t know! But giving up isn’t going to get us anywhere, either! There’s still a _chance_. We’re not the last ones left; I _know_ there are other people in Happy Harbor. People like us.” _Survivors_.

“And how do you propose we get there?” Wally demands. “I’m not gonna _walk_ , and I’m pretty sure you’re _way_ too young to have a license, and my permit’s expired, so—”

“I highly doubt the highway patrol is going to be especially concerned with underage driving when there’s a zombie apocalypse going down in every major city across the country,” Dick says dryly.

“Don’t—” Wally’s eyebrows mash together in a frown over tightly closed eyes, like Dick’s just punched him in the chest. “Don’t call them that.”

Dick lets his regret settle over him for a few moments before starting to reach over to grip Wally’s hand, but then he realizes just what he’s doing and his fingers freeze inches away, hesitate, and withdraw. He settles his palm on the surface of the cement tunnel the two of them are sitting on. The junkyard smells like rust and blood, and the stale smell of Wally’s animal crackers mingles with it.

“Wally, listen,” Dick murmurs. “We’ve got weapons, we’ve got some food, we’ve got an interstate highway littered with abandoned vehicles in working condition, and we’ve got…” _Each other_. “Moral fiber.”

Wally snorts through his nose. Dick can’t remember the last time he’d heard him laugh.

“Moral fiber, dude? Really?” He shakes his head before lifting it to survey the ashen night sky, curling his fingers into the fabric of his torn jeans. “If I wind up zombie chow, I’m gonna hate you forever. You won’t get my PlayStation, either.”

“Tragic. Good thing I’ve already got three back at the manor,” Dick retorts smugly. It feels weird talking about Wayne Manor like it hasn’t been reduced to rubble and empty hallways. _Hurry, Master Grayson; don’t be afraid_ , Alfred had said, and that had been the last Dick had ever heard from him.

It turns out Dick hadn’t needed to take Wally’s hand anyway. While they’re drifting off under the dented roof of an abandoned truck cab, Wally’s fingers find his on their own, and they’re warm and callused and they shake, and when Dick wakes up in the morning to a gray sky, he isn’t even sure if he’d dreamed it or not.

 

 

 

**ii.**

“You have to swing it like this,” Wally laughs, and before Dick can toss back some defensive remark, Wally has stepped up behind him on the grass and wrapped his palms around Dick’s knuckles, steadying his grip on the baseball bat. Dick swallows. The freckles on his neck are so close.

“I really don’t think it’s going to help my aim if we’re trying to hit the ball with two sets of hands,” Dick deadpans as best he can, but Wally ignores him.

In unison, they swing the bat, slow and sure through the clean summer air, and the motion causes Dick’s body to turn and his mouth to stop just an inch from Wally’s and before he can remember how to breathe, Wally has released him, clapping him on the shoulder.

“I might make a batter out of you yet,” Wally says with a complacent grin, and Dick lightly whacks the bat into his shoulder. “Ow! What was that for?”

“Fun,” Dick answers simply, getting back into position.

 

 

 

**iii.**

They make it to Happy Harbor in a sputtering pickup by siphoning gas off of every car they pass along the freeway. Dick’s heard the stories – of a sparse clan of survivors setting up a refuge in the heart of a giant mountain, accepting any uninfected who came their way, for the good of the human race, and all that. Before the outbreak had hit Central and Gotham Cities, Wally had joked that it was probably just an enormous love nest for “carrying on the population,” and had snickered, and Dick had laughed with him, because everything had been so far away then, so incredibly beyond the wrought iron fence of Wayne Manor.

Wally lets out a quiet exclamation of awe when the peak of the mountain rises up over the horizon, and both of them ignore how empty the city is; both of them ignore the shambling figures moving along the sidewalks in the growing dusk.

Wally only has to bash in one of them with his baseball bat. Even though he’s faced down countless creatures and beaten them into stillness, he never loses the wild fear and guilt in his eyes when he swings his arms down the way someone with an axe would, and he never stops falling into hollow states of silence in the aftermaths. As he and Dick stand at the entrance to the mountain shelter – a set of metal double doors, accompanied by an intercom and a keypad – his head is bowed and the hand holding onto the wooden handle is shaking violently.

“Who’s there?” The voice that cuts sharply over the intercom is wary and female, sounding roughened by sand and smoke and solitude.

“Um… hi, we’re, uh, refugees,” Dick explains intelligently. “We… we came from Gotham City?”

A pause. Then: “Names?”

“I’m Dick Grayson.” Dick gestures to Wally, even though he knows she can’t see him; otherwise she wouldn’t have asked who was there. “And this is Wally West.”

He hears a snort over the intercom. “His name’s really _Wally_?”

“Hey,” Wally defends with something close to a pout, the first word he’s said since the zombie encounter on the beach.

“Nice one,” the girl teases. “Oh- _kay_. So. Have either of you been bitten, scratched, or otherwise given open wounds?”  

“No,” Dick and Wally answer in unison.

“Have either of you experienced symptoms in the last 24 hours such as nausea, headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, fainting, difficulty breathing, black or bloody stools, nosebleeds, seizures, or death?”

Dick and Wally glance at each other on the last one. “No?”

“Answer me definitely, yes or no,” she snaps. “I’m not fucking around.”  

“No.”

“Have either of you come into contact with the saliva or other bodily fluids of an infected individual?”

“No.”

“Have you done anything that may have led any infected to this base, or do you plan to do anything to compromise the safety of this area?”

“No.”

There’s a longer stretch of silence after that one, but then, with a crackle, the girl announces, “All right; you’re good. You’ll be escorted to a quarantined area to be hosed down and examined by a health official.”

The health official tells them just to call her Dinah, and she’s calm and witty and inexplicably comforting, her blonde hair tied into a thick ponytail, her face chiseled and her gaze piercing.

“You boys are a long way from home,” she comments. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but – I’m honestly amazed you made it this far.”

“We have our assets,” Dick replies, puffing out his chest. “His baseball bat, my charm and good looks…”

“Don’t listen to him,” Wally grumbles with a fond roll of his eyes. “If infected fed off of ego, he’d be Christmas dinner.”

“That makes no sense,” Dick says tartly. “And I, personally, think it’s presumptuous to pigeonhole infected into only one religious sect.”

“Oh, you’re going to fit right in,” Dinah mutters under her breath.

 

 

 

**iv.**

The boy in charge is called Kaldur, and he’s tall and serene and commands a brotherly authority the likes of which Dick has never encountered. Artemis, who’s Wally’s age, is his girlfriend (something Dick commends, because anyone who can be in love at a time like this is either crazy or admirable), and she has the highest record of zombie kills in the entire mountain, and she flaunts it like a little girl with a merit badge. Dick would be surprised that a girl with such constantly flawless blonde hair and clear gray eyes could be so merciless if he didn’t see how swiftly she came down on Wally for stealing one of her cheese cubes once.

Second only to her is Conner, a grumbling powerhouse with unforgiving fists and some level of a glare always pinching his face, except when he’s around Megan, a pacifist with auburn hair and dimples, who seems a little lost without his hand to hold onto (but Dick knows she can hold her own; he’s seen her during training, taking out dummies through cleverness and evasion rather than attack).

Then there’s Raquel, who usually leads foraging squads with Artemis during daylight, and who spends nearly all of her time either lifting weights or rereading a withering copy of _Death in the Afternoon_. Her best friend, Zatanna, is smart and pretty and projects a strong distaste for violence, but she doesn’t stoutly avoid it the way Megan does. Finally, Kaldur’s second in command and best friend, Roy, mostly does a lot of sulking and grumbling, his shock of red hair entirely appropriate for his short temper, but Dick likes him okay.

A lot of even younger kids are running around the mountain base, too – a freckled boy named Garfield, who Megan had taken in as a surrogate younger brother when his mother had been bitten; the silent and unsmiling Tim, who Dick is almost positive he’s seen around Gotham before, but he can’t really know for sure anymore; a battle-ready and boisterous girl named Cassie, who ties her hair in a ponytail and just wants to “kick some undead butt”; a tall boy named Lagaan, whose levels of morbid enthusiasm are on par with Cassie’s; Bart, a hyperactive kid trying his hardest to stay light-hearted, and Jaime, his best friend, who’s from El Paso and might as well be attached to Bart at the elbow; Karen, the go-to science girl, and her burly boyfriend, Mal; and, to Dick’s shock, Barbara Gordon, who he’d known in middle school.

“You made it all the way out here?” he asks her, astonished, and she quirks a red eyebrow back at him, smirking dryly.

“If _you_ could do it, then it’s not saying much,” she jokes. It feels strangely nice, joking, even with the persistent air of grim reality hanging over it.

Dick and Wally fall into the cogwork of the whole crew with ease, especially Wally. They’re both put up in the same room as Bart and Jaime (although Bart sneaks out regularly to go over to wherever Tim sleeps and sometimes doesn’t come back until morning). They aren’t sent out on any patrols for rations, or put on night watches; those are reserved for the group members with seniority, namely Conner, Megan, Kaldur, Roy, or Artemis. Dick doesn’t mind, but he can tell that Wally starts to get antsy, not being able to go outside, not being able to see anything of the sky because the mountain has no windows.

“Part of what makes it such a good shelter,” Artemis explains gruffly. “No way to get in except the front and back doors, and they’re steel.”

“What was this place even _used_ for before all this went down?” Wally asks, and Artemis doesn’t answer him; she just grins obliquely to herself.

“Gin,” she announces, tossing her cards down. “You lose again, Red.”

Wally groans and falls back. “Aw, man!”

It makes the time that Artemis almost dies that much harder, but she gives them a bloody smile and a delirious thumbs-up when Kaldur (ashen and shaking and unable to let go of her) carries her in, and Dick and Wally sit outside her infirmary room all night, not even noticing that they’re gripping each other’s sweaty hands.

“I know this probably isn’t the most romantic atmosphere ever,” Artemis rasps dryly when she’s conscious and stable again, and they’re sitting next to her bed, “What with the constant death and decay and stuff, but I don’t know why you idiots don’t kiss more.”

“I don’t either,” Dick mutters without thinking. Wally stares over at him, eyebrows raised, and Dick immediately wishes that was zombie chow, a sentiment that he will never entertain again but that seems entirely appropriate for the situation into which he’s just dropped himself.

Artemis snickers behind her fist and pointedly covers her eyes and that’s when Dick tastes Wally’s hesitant mouth for the first time, to the sound of an EKG pinging in the background, so much slower than his suddenly roaring, crashing, ultimately alive heart.

His hope has never felt more real.  

 

 

 

**v.**

The thing is that none of them die. They make a good team, and apparently that’s enough to carry them through, because the months wear on and they chase each other around the Cave and annoy Kaldur and make fun of how much Tim and Bart blush around each other and silently thank the powers that be for the fact that Zatanna and Megan are such amazing cooks, and Wally still doesn’t beat Artemis at gin rummy (although he does go out on patrols, eventually, and of course Dick can’t let him do that alone, so he joins, too), and Dick gets this feeling one day that it’s been a year.

“No way,” Wally says disbelievingly when Dick brings this up. They’re lying side-by-side on Wally’s bottom bunk; Jaime is asleep and Bart is probably in Tim’s room. “That’s… reassuring.”

His sarcasm is glaringly evident. Dick shifts slightly, dropping his chin onto Wally’s chest and scowling at him.

“It _is_ ,” he insists. “Because we’re alive and we’ve made it this far and nobody’s died. Come on, Wally.”

It had been weird to adjust to the fact that, between the two of them, Dick is now the one more inclined toward hopefulness, while Wally has been forcing himself into a niche of cynicism that doesn’t suit him. Dick can’t explain it – maybe it comes from a compulsion to act like a grown-up, since grown-ups apparently don’t have an optimistic bone in their world-weary bodies – but it’s been ebbing since they’ve gotten to the Cave, since Wally has learned that he’s not the only scared kid out there.

“Yeah,” Wally finally concedes. His fingers find Dick’s hair and tangle it in circles. He’s staring at the ceiling, the tiniest of smiles quirking on his tired mouth. “Yeah. We’re alive.”

Dick opts out of the next patrol because Bart had requested his help with some math homework he’s always doing over again and will never turn in. Wally salutes him over his shoulder when he leaves with the others, winking.

When Kaldur, Conner, and Artemis come back and Dick looks up from the paper on the kitchen table in front of him, he sees that Wally is slung between them and bleeding.

A thunderous, galloping sound spikes in his skull, and he’s pretty sure that all of the blood in him stops moving. Against the backs of his eyelids are the silhouettes of two figures falling from trapezes, faster and faster, and he stands haphazardly, knocking his chair aside in his clumsy haste.

“He saved me,” is all Conner says, over and over, his face wrenched into a glare that seems more agonized than his usual disgruntled fare. “He saved my life.”

“He’s going to be fine,” Artemis barks. “Both of you get out. Grayson, you stay.”

“But Artemis—” Kaldur starts to say, but Artemis hushes him swiftly with a kiss, fixing him with a solemn stare when she draws away.

“Trust me, Kal,” she murmurs.

Dick only half-hears all of this. He stands blankly at the foot of Wally’s bed, hands balled into fists so tight that his knuckles feel close to breaking the skin. The blood is coming from Wally’s left leg, which is mangled and crooked, and Wally’s chest is rising and falling in short, feeble jerks.

Dick stays while Artemis takes on the hefty task of disinfecting the wound. He stays while she cleans it, bandages it, splints it. He stays and thinks so fiercely of baseball fields and dusty nights and sore feet and steady breathing that he feels close to being sick.

Sleeping in a plastic chair for fifteen nights and refusing to eat anything but extra Jell-O cups does not do wonders for his health, but nobody even thinks about trying to intercede and tell him to leave over the course of the next two weeks. Dick doesn’t say anything aloud about how Wally can’t _do this_ , they were supposed to _make it_ , together, to _somewhere_ , somewhere that knew how being alive worked, somewhere that still had a sun. He doesn’t say any of it.

“He’ll be okay,” Artemis repeats every now and then; she doesn’t bother telling Dick anything else. Then, ferociously, she adds, “I promise. I _swear_.”

Dick has learned to take Artemis at her word, just as he has learned that Conner’s smiles are earned and not given, just as he has learned that Megan only bakes so many cupcakes because she’s terrified of nighttime and all the things it brings, just as he has learned that Roy’s anger is justified and Kaldur feels about to die with the ache of wanting to protect all of them and all of the younger kids talk a big game but will still always go to sleep by 11, the way their parents had taught them to. So—

“Hey.” Wally’s voice comes out of him in a willowy rasp and Dick wakes with a start, the pattern of his sleeve emblazoned on his cheek from where he’d been sleeping. Wally’s eyes are barely open, but his grin is goofy, and his fingers twitch in Dick’s direction.

“Nice of you to join us,” Dick tells him, not an iota of spite in him. “Although I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed you’re still around, since that means I won’t get your PlayStation for another few years.”

“Jeez,” Wally whines, shaking his head slowly. “World’s coming to an end and you’re still a total dick. Big surprise.”

“Don’t make puns; it’s unseemly,” Dick retorts, but then he climbs out of the chair and sits on the edge of the bed and fights to keep his hands in his lap. “And shut up about the world ending. It can just be a world as long as we’re in it, you know.”

Wally’s green eyes shift, glassy, to his. Dick holds the gaze of the boy who taught him how to knock a ball into the summer air and always gave him the bigger portions of their bean cans, despite his considerably larger appetite.

“Sappy,” Wally eventually says with a wince, and then appends, “But… appealing.”

“Just admit that I always have the best ideas,” Dick tells him cheekily.

Wally lifts his arm, grips the hair at the nape of Dick’s neck, pulls him down, and kisses him. His morning breath is terrible, but Dick doesn’t care.

“Only a little,” Wally mumbles, grinning to himself. There are no windows in the mountain, so neither of them knows that, outside, over the bay, over the harbor, the sun has started to push its way back over the horizon.    


End file.
